March 17, 2022
SARTORIUS
by Erik Martiny
I had what you would call an eccentric childhood, especially by Irish standards of behaviour. This being said, my parents were not what you would call Surrealist artists or anything so it wasn’t as if my mother was Leonora Carrington, getting up at night to snip a lock of hair from the sleeping heads of unsuspecting guests, mixing the abducted filaments with eggs to make what she called hair omelettes and serving these for breakfast.
Neither was my father as bizarre as Max Ernst or Salvador Dali, although he was, as I recall, very fond of imitating the Spanish painter, twining an imaginary wisp of a moustache, rolling his eyes and drawling in heavily accented Spanish: ‘the only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad’.
My sister and I didn’t exactly have to bear the embarrassment of my parents walking a full-sized armadillo on a leash through the streets of Southern Ireland, but at times it did feel a little like it. At an age when fashion, or at least the importance of being presentable, had begun to impinge on my adolescent sense of what was allowable in public, my parents would take us on long evening walks, dressed invariably in clothes that had patently not been renewed for over two decades.
But the most embarrassing detail to me in those days was not the threadbare flares they flaunted when everyone else’s legs were encased in skin-tight jeans, or even the neon-bright shirts my mother favoured when everyone else in the island of Ireland considered grey a gay colour. No, it was the woollen hats they both inevitably sported once the sun had set. And atop each hat, at the tip of a length of tapering wool, a fluffy, snowball pompon wobbled in the wind.
I would brace myself and cringe as neighbours approached and my father boomed out his inevitably convivial, old-fashioned Frenchman’s greeting. The Irish men and women on our block were invariably courteous, usually managing to quash their sense of amusement to the corners of their smiles as I beat down my embarrassment, tempering the shame into a shield of battered bronze.
My father was born in 1939, a few months before the outbreak of World War II, and this historical fact gave his naturally eccentric personality an even more curious inflection. Although we were never short of money (I even believed we were rich in those days), he took a strange pride in looking as poor as possible.
My father’s parents had had it pretty rough during the war, living in a village in Southern France. My grandfather had been forced to steal potatoes to feed the family; my grandmother had lost all her teeth by the age of thirty. My father had come out of his wartime experience as a toddler with a never-flagging sense that his parents had deprived themselves of every possible thing so that he and his sister could make it. He thus spent the rest of his life using and preserving things until they could no longer hold together, and even then there was always adhesive tape or glue or thread or binding wire. He wore the cuts in his clothes like war-torn medals, the bullet-holes of time. If a streak of dirt could manage to add itself around a hole, then that was all the better. My father even began to fancy my mother for the first time the day he saw her rushing to a lecture as a student with a stripe of bicycle oil on her calf.
Shoes were key items in my parents’ dress sense. My mother wore the same three pairs for thirty years. My father wore his late father-in-law’s shoes even though they were at least a size too small for him.
Both of my parents regularly rummaged through bins. Separately or together, they would rake through junkyards to scavenge bits of shoe or shreds of shirt. I stood by, watching in silence, impassibly registering their cries of glee when a rainworthy coat was found, a pair of trousers that would fit, a sock that could be matched with an almost similar one lying at home. We had a massive chest of drawers that contained literally dozens of second-hand hats and gloves and scarves. You hear of celebrity singers having a different pair of shoes for every day of the year. We had a slightly less glamorous version of that at home.
So if my father might be construed as Surrealism’s enthusiastic poor relation, a kind of Salvational Dali, or Max in Earnest, my mother was Leonora Carry-a-ton.
You might think that with such sartorial confusion at home, it was a relief to go to school, with its orderly, mandatory uniform, the compulsory, standardized tie, the regulated clean shirt with its homogeneously, impeccably cut blazer and feint-ruled pants; bizarrely enough, it was at school that I experienced the most sartorial estrangement.
Although I was school-raised in the only co-educational establishment in the city, which mercifully allowed some interaction with the opposite sex, diversity was not encouraged at all. Girls wore the same uniform as boys (with just a nondescript grey skirt to indicate genital belonging). A number of vigilante teachers would train hawk eyes on every detail that diverged from the official colour code. A tie that deviated from the authorized burgundy could draw a screech from the menacing machine who taught us maths; a sock that was too light a grey could trigger an unending diatribe against the perils of sartorial depravity. Occasionally, a pupil would go so far as to venture white on pain of death.
It appears to me now that with all the open-mindedness and liberal thinking infused in me by my parents, the idea of appearing in plainclothes one day never occurred to me even in fantasy, although I had numerous nightmares in which I walked barefoot to school in my pyjamas.
Of course the theory behind the uniform is well known: it is meant to inspire a sense of respect for authority, orderly conduct, it is designed to limit social discrepancies, erase a sense of teenage individualism. There is even a potentially spiritual message behind the uniform as it is supposed to promote anti-materialist habits and indeed in our school there were no Giorgio Armani blazers, no Dolce & Gabbana T-shirts. Nor did anyone bother in those days with Cardin underwear, at least as far as I know.
And yet, despite all the regulation, the whole scheme was a shambles. Hidden, toilet violence was rife amongst pupils; weakish or boring teachers were hectored remorselessly; money was worshipped almost as much as in Monte Carlo and social distinctions were abundantly visible through the state of the uniform. Perhaps the only feature that it fostered was the eradication of originality. Difference was viewed by all and sundry with a suspicion verging on disgust.
The compulsory place we had to inhabit in order to receive an education in those days, back in the 70s and 80s, took on a decidedly alarming cast for me when a large number of pupils developed what you might call a para-uniform, a second set of outer clothing which managed to escape the censor’s tongue-lash. This parallel uniform presented itself in the form of a greatcoat, known to initiates as the parka, an indispensable item for the cool in-crowd, the official members of the Inner Party. And around the feet of the parka-wearer, grew a tar-black excrescence, what I saw as a manure of molten lava, a thick-soled, ankle-covering, dark-laced boot that swallowed the calf like a boa. I couldn’t keep my eyes off their laces which reminded me so unnervingly of Frankenstein’s crude cranial stitching.
As far as I remember, though the white sock was considered to be beyond the pale of the permissible, the parka and double club foot never failed to pass muster among teachers. And the worst of it all was the fact that these boots seemed to be modelled on boots worn by soldiers of the Waffen SS. Almost unbelievably, the khaki-coloured parka also carried a small German flag stitched onto the shoulder pad. It looked in those days as if the disbanded legions of the German army were reconstituting themselves in the ranks of Irish youth. It was inexplicable, I couldn’t understand it. Why of all flags the German flag?
I had learned in history class that despite the Irish government’s putatively neutral line it still tended to favour the Allies. Only the IRA had briefly consorted with the Nazis in the hope of overthrowing Britain. I saw my classmates’ dress sense as the expression of Ireland’s subconscious fascination for Nazi Germany, growing like a second skin over officially sanctioned uniforms across the nation.
Of course there was nothing as dramatic as Fascism going on in my youth, and Irish (and British) secondary schools were very gentle versions of the concentration camp. No deaths occurred, at least in my school camp, just mildly unbearable bullying, the gentle prodding of the stick in your heart. Mind control was no more than a tightly-strung band held in place to mould the form of your skull into the correct shape, a finger stirring your brain.
But even these memories are but the Expressionistic after-images of a childhood that was really rather happy. Ireland, which I still prefer to call Sartorius when referring to my teenage years, was by no means an entirely dystopian location, even in those days, and when I finally reached university I could hardly believe that the secondary school camps I had been through existed within the same country.
Despite my inevitable difference as the offspring of two eccentric Francophones, despite the fact that in Sartorius I tended to be seen as Frog or Faggot (both qualifiers not quite hitting the mark), I did have friends and even girlfriends, or at least one steady one who, with some measure of cultural shock, managed to date me for over a year.
Sartorius was in its seventh rainy season when I met her that year. Enough rain spat down from the Catholic sky to drown the city. The floods in the greens and street corners had been there for so long the suburban dwellers in my vicinity began to view them as the local ponds. I used to walk her home through the squelching, soggy paddy fields, thanking the rain for inconveniencing our steps so that our hips could knock together. We had to wade through an endless football field of mud to get to her place, dribbling the ball of our desire, weaving it round our feet as we stepped round the muddier patches, for ages not daring to score.
Her father was the main hindrance to that as he would regularly barge into his daughter’s room whenever we had been in there alone for too long, treating us to a glare or a rough, abrasive word. He was really quite a charming man, once you got him going on his favourite subject which was invariably potatoes, Sartorian music and the national novelist. He was rather cultivated despite the fact that he had never received much education. With time, he even came to enjoy my presence, especially after he discovered I could be lectured to.
Before the sudden, sharp decline in our relationship, he even took to giving me an avuncular tap on the back, gave me a record or two, prepared coffee on more than one occasion. He even took to counselling me in the fine art of handling women, advice which I secretly derided, having recently read A.S. Neil and D.H. Lawrence.
One day, he placed a hard but friendly hand on my shoulder. With the tone of a man who has drunk deep from the pond of knowledge and swallowed its salmon, he said ‘you know, we men are sometimes better off leaving the Missus alone...’ Long, meaningful silence ensued. I stared into his motionless eyes, trying to grasp his intention. When he saw he had made me sufficiently uncomfortable, he dove to the depths of this insight: ‘It sometimes means you have to push your own need to the side...if you get what I’m after, do you?... I’ll put it this way, maybe we’re better off watching the Telly or reading the Paper and leaving her be by herself. If you see what I mean...’ I nodded in silence, but then decided to add that maybe women needed us to make them want us. As I ventured this, all I could think of was Connie sheltering a yellow chick in her hands, nestling it between her breasts.
He looked at me as if I had just talked of a parallel world, a place that had nothing to do with Sartorius. His eyes took on a lost look for an instant. He snapped out of it and looked at me with a smirk of derision. ‘I do it myself’, he countered, ‘sometimes, I just sit down on the sofa, watch the news or a film, and the woman is better off without it.’ I let it go at that and we remained on congenial terms for another few months, until the incident for which he never forgave me.
His daughter had also made it quite clear that intercourse was out of the question. Reciprocal, interlocking genital friction was fine as long as it didn’t lead to what she referred to as ‘sex’, saying the word as if it was a deeply engrained kind of insult, something filthy and dangerous like putting salt and then muck in a wound. ‘My da would kill me if he thought we were having it,' was the reason she gave. The leaf-flecked, light-catching amber of her irises glinting solemnly as she said it.
Her father saw me as a harmless Frenchie with his Frenchie ways, but submissive. Not the type to do the dirt or soil her maidenhood. Until one day, he found a book I had given her for her seventeenth birthday, hidden away under the mattress. Written the year I was born, Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex was still all the rage in Britain and America. It had finally found its snaky way onto the shelves of bookstores in Sartorius.
When I came back a few weeks later, giving him time to appease the lightning bolts of his anger, he stared me stonily in the eyes. I was given to understand that I would be ‘Tolerated but no longer Welcome’.
From that time onwards, he avoided being in my presence. When compelled to do so, he would stay on endlessly in the same room, usually the kitchen, our only refuge, as the bedroom and sitting room were now off limits. On one occasion, he came in to clean the sink with a sponge. I can tell you, I have never seen anyone clean a sink so thoroughly: he washed and scrubbed and rinsed and bathed and scoured and rinsed again a countless number of times, a real labour of love, the tongue of the sponge licking every recess, every cranny, every shiny surface. Then he stared down into the shaft of the sink as if he was looking down a well, for endless minutes, trying to catch sight of his reflection at the bottom.
The only time he spoke to me in that glacial period of Sartorian history was to deliver a somewhat threatening anecdote. At the time, his wife, Mrs Sweeney, who was a professional knitter of Aran sweaters, had agreed to make one for me, having been asked by my mother who in turn had agreed, against her better judgment, to get me a brand-new jumper for my birthday, conceding with this extravagant request only because Aran knitwear was known to last more than a lifetime.
One day, as Connie’s father was gazing at his wife knitting the patterned wool into her lap, seemingly lost in thought, he said ‘Do you know that every traditional Aran jumper has a different pattern on it?’ I said ‘really?’, delighted that we were now on speaking terms again. ‘Iss true’, he added, ‘and d’ya know why?’
Three German soldiers passed in front of the window.
Mr Sweeney paused to look out and then leaned his beaky nose in my direction. Looking me directly in the eye now for the first time in four months, he said ‘it’s because people needed to be able to identify fishers who had drowned.’ He stared at me hard, and then walked out of the room.
I took it as the threat it was, despite my girlfriend’s remonstrations that he was just trying to act the hard man. I was given abundant confirmation of this menace each time I wore the jumper. ‘It’s-a-lovely-Aran-sweater-you-have-there’, he would say as if it was one word, a sharp slit of a smile briefly animating the stone-dead features of the face.
And yet, with all those veiled and not so veiled threats, I did not end up face down in a flooded paddy field with only a stitching of wool to identify my waterlogged remains.
Connie and I broke up some time later because she felt too young to take it further, at least that was the official line. Much later I learned with some surprise that her parents had also split up, and stranger still, that her father had seemingly disappeared into thin air.
Living as a lodger down in the outskirts of the suburb, near the woods, his clothes were found one day in a pile, sloughed like a moult at the foot of a giant elm tree. No trace of him was ever found.